About This Blog

This blog is for readers interested in social applications and technology empowerment inside and outside companies, as we have described in our books Empowered and Groundswell. The blog is part of the Forrester Research blog collection.

October 12, 2007

As I mentioned after receiving the entries, there were some fascinating and, more to the point, highly effective social applications in the 78 entries we got. It wasn't easy to pick the best, since there were so many good ones. But, of course, we did. While we used several criteria, the most important was: did the application prove it delivered on business value.

To see the complete list of winners and finalists, click here.

Listening. Schwab's Money and More Community of Gen Xers empowered by Communispace

In January 2007, Charles Schwab worked with Communispace to launch their “Money and More” private online community made up of 350 25-to-40 year old Generation X non-Schwab clients. Based on insights from the community, Schwab lowered account minimums to $1,000, introduced Schwab’s high-yield Investor checking account with a high yield, and developing an online landing page specifically for the Gen X target.
Schwab has added 32% more Gen Xers YTD when compared to similar timeframes last year.

Chevrolet, along with Weber Shandwick, set out to support the launch of the 2007 redesigned Chevy Aveo with a focus on college students. They created a contest: two students on each of seven college campuses across the nation were selected to see who could "live the largest" inside a Chevy Aveo for five days, only leaving the car for class and 10-minute bio breaks while documenting their entire adventure online. The students embraced the idea enthusiastically, creating YouTube videos, MySpace and Facebook groups, photos, blogs, and other realistic expressions of their experiences. Result: in just five days, the Aveo Livin' Large Campus Challenge generated 217 million audience impressions through online, traditional, grassroots and campus media. Over one million students were actively engaged in the Challenge through the Aveo web site and links in each team's Facebook and MySpace accounts.

NetShops is a specialty online retailer of home and lifestyle products with 156 separate online storefronts. It launched tag-based customer reviews from PowerReviews in November 2006 on all 156 websites. Within 6 months, the sites featured 19,500 customer reviews and a 26% increase in sales.

Jordan Brand’s Breakfast Club is an interactive online training community. Customers can select pre-built workout curriculums or create their own. The self-built programs incorporate a social component through peer assessments. 120,000 consumers signed up, and when the Training Tool for the Breakfast Club launched in August 2006, 100,000 more unique visitors came to the site than the previous year. Visitors spent an average of 6 minutes on the site.

Salesforce.com built an “ideas market” -- like Digg for customer feedback and product innovation -- that allows members of the community (customers, partners, industry watchers) to submit, vote and comment on new product features. Salesforce.com's Idea Exchange generated 4500 ideas and over 82,000 votes in its first year. Half of salesforce.com's new features now come from suggestions on this idea exchange. Two of the suggestions were also turned into new products by third-party salesforce.com developers within weeks of the being highlighted on the Idea Exchange.

Online development company with 1900 employees developed an internal wiki to run all of its projects and increase efficiency. 987 of the 1900 employees visited the wiki in June. Page views have gone from 6,000 to 27,000 per month in six months, while page edits grew to 25,000 cumulative. There are 6505 pages of content and 2000 blog posts on the wiki. Projects are now faster and people far more responsive and collaborative.

Visitors to this site are encouraged to create graphics for a section of the US/Mexico border fence, with the objective of encouraging people to be more thoughtful about this issue. Visitors can review and vote for the entries they like. The site attracted over 1,000 entries, 8,000 reviews, 300,000 views, and lots of press coverage.

We created this new category to capture the powerful changes happening across all functions at Dell. The Dell Customer Advocate program, which pursues fast resolution of support problems, decreased the negative share of online comments about Dell by 25%. Direct2Dell, Dell's frank and informative blog, generates 3.5 million page views per month. Ideastorm, Dell's innovation community, tallied 500,000 votes for over 7,000 ideas and generated a new product, Dell PC's with Linux pre-installed. And Employee Storm, an internal idea community, has generated 2,700 ideas and seen visits from 22% of Dell's employees.

September 25, 2007

Apologies for the short notice, but I'm going to be giving a free Forrester Webinar on the use of Social Technographics (explanation is available in this post) on Wednesday, September 26th at 11am EST. Here's the description:

Don’t yet believe or don’t clearly see how social
technologies can apply to your industry? Or perhaps you’re currently struggling
with prioritizing across a vast array of social technologies and need to
identify how your audience uses social technologies and how it will evolve over
time.

We invite you to join us for
a complimentary Forrester Webinar "Know Your Customers’ Social
Technographics And Craft The Right Social Marketing Strategy " on
Wednesday, September 26 at 11 a.m. Eastern Time (5 p.m. Central European
Time).

This Webinar, hosted by Vice President, Principal Analyst
Charlene Li, will emphasize the necessity of understanding your target
audience’s attitudes and behaviors towards social technologies in order to
craft a truly fruitful social marketing strategy. Forrester will elaborate on
the concept of Social Technographics and demonstrate that it is possible
to reap the fruit of consumer power by knowing their profiles, social
technology usage and motivations. Not only is that critical for today’s social
engagement with your customers, but it is also paramount for an anticipatory
approach of tomorrow’s usage shift and audience maturation.

This Webinar will address:

-How are consumers
using social technologies?

-How are marketers
using social technologies to reach their customers?

September 13, 2007

[D]isruptive changes . . . can be viewed from 2 very different perspectives—as an
opportunity or as a threat. In fact, entrepreneurs often view
disruptive change as a source of opportunity. When they see a disrupted
business environment—whether that disruption is from new technologies,
new business models, or new regulations—they ask, "How can I leverage
these changes to create value?"

But established companies often approach innovation and disruption much
differently. Having worked hard to align strategy and organization to
support the current business, they develop tunnel vision, encouraging
employees, customers, suppliers, and partners to work together to
deliver today's business results. Even when disruptive opportunities
are identified, tightly aligned organizations, business models, and
industry relationships make it tough to respond quickly and
effectively. As a result, executives in established firms often frame
disruption as a threat. When they see changes happening, they work to
defend their existing business model and ask, "How can I insulate
against these disruptive threats and preserve my current business
model?"

Prof. Applegate's point is interesting in the context of the groundswell. The groundswell is full of threats since you are no longer in control of your brand -- your customers are. Seeing this as an opportunity takes guts.

I have just decided this is what the next 12 months of my life is about -- helping you to find opportunity, not just threat, in social technologies. It's harder than it looks.

About Forrester

Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 27 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.